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This autobiographical book looks like a very harsh reckoning of the writer with her parents, and especially her father. She grew up in rural France, in a small Norman town where there was a very strict morality and work ethic, strongly influenced by the Catholic Church. Ernaux first briefly describes the life of her grandparents, small farmers, but then mainly focuses on her surly father, a man who worked himself up from simple labourer to shop owner.

The first half of the book has a downright naturalistic slant: the hard work, the austerity of life, the impossibility to enjoy. Ernaux describes it all in a very clinically distant way, and in the second half portrays her own rebellion against the life and worldview of her parents. Between the lines you occasionally notice some self-doubt, namely whether she has not betrayed her own environment by her entry into the world of bourgeoisie; and perhaps that's the reason why she wrote this book: “Je hasarde une explication: écrire c'est le dernier recours quand on a trahi.� In that sense, this harsh book may be a form of therapeutic writing.

Ernaux explicitly opted for what she calls neutrality, a dry enumeration of facts and events, but this booklet is just the opposite: almost every sentence reveals a conscious distancing from the world of her parents, no attempt at all to empathize with them. It’s almost as if - at the stage of writing - she had not yet transcended the phase of puberal rebellion. In that respect I think Les Années, her most famous work and also autobiographical, is a much more successful attempt!